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S.M.I.L.E. - Staff MobILity for school rEvolution
Start date: Aug 1, 2015, End date: Jul 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

SMILE project (School rEvoLusion) is an innovative new project which has two parts:1) Job shadowing with an Italian partner in their two schools and 2) the possibility for English Language courses for Joutsa's teachers. Joutsa municipality in a small village, about 5000 inhabitants in a 1000 square kilometres area, lies far away from big cities and is surrounded by forrests, agriculture and lakes. There are one over 300 pupils in secondary school (grades 1.-9.) and one high school with 87 students in Joutsa centre, two smaller schools for grades 1.-6., Mieskonmäki (21 pupils) and Kurkiaura (34 pupils), lies about 20 km away from the village centre. There are 43 teachers in Joutsa municipality. Joutsa municipality has made big investments in our schools and all facilities and classrooms are effectively equipped with modern ICT. SMILE project is a great possibility for our teachers to gain additional education, make them more aware of the European perspective and all this will benefit all our pupils and students. Joutsa municipality wants to have motivated and committed teachers in our schools who also realize the EU project possibilities and the European perspective. We believe that international co-operation is very important for teaching the pupils about cultural differencies and tolerance. The main aims of our project are: 1) Develop theachers teacherhood, skills, methods, attitudes. 2) To deepen our co-operation with our partner schools in order to have different projects in the future. 3) To develop our municipality´s teaching department´s internationalisation strategy. 4) To give more selfesteem to our teacher to use English. Our partner school has good knowlegde of CLIL, which means Content and Language Integrated Learning, and that is one method we are also very interested in learning!! In practise SMILE project means that 8 teachers are going to a Job Shadow period to our Italian partner schools, the project is reprical and Italian partner will applying for themselves, so that we will host Italian teachers on their period in Joutsa. Project also means that 4 teachers will participate a language course either in England, Malta or Spain. The amount of participating teacher can´t be too big in order not to disturbe the school´s yearly schedule and the timetable of their absent must be plan carefully, some of the event may happen during school holidays. The plan is that 4 teacher will participate job shadow per year and 2 teachers will take part in a language course per year. Total number participating teachers in job shadow is 8 and in language courses 4. This participating group will form the "key-group" for mutual support before, during and after the SMILE-events: For Job Shadowing there are 3 secondary and high school teachers and one classteacher, and 4 "open places". For Language courses there are 2 secondary school teachers and one who works in both schools, and 1 "open place". The excpected impact on the participants will be tremendous! The new international attitude which teachers will develop will be transmitted into their teaching and through that to the pupils and students too. Teachers will learn new methods and experience different ways of teaching, that opens their eyes for new perspectives. They are able to critically monitor and reflect their teaching skills and methodology, in order to get new thoughts and use these at home. SMILE is revolusional for us in a way that it opens the European horizon to our teachers. Joutsa municipality will get refreshed and motivated teachers who will have better international attitude, and that will be shown in their theaching skills and methods. Our teachers work in different schools and different levels and so all these ideas will transfer amongst all our municipality´s children and young people. This will offer also all the families further perspective, their children will get a more open view to the world and better understanding for different cultures. Evaluation of the SMILE is done by participating teachers. Their Selfmonitoring-work has many phases: before the event teachers will set personal aims and expectations, during it they will keep a personal daily diary and a public blog, after their event they will write a final repot and they will have a evaluation meeting with the "key-group". Key-group is formed of all the participating teachers and it is way for peer support before, during and after the SMILE events. Dissamination of projects results are done mainly in municipality´s teachers meetings and VESO-days where participating teacher give presentations of their SMILE-events for all our teachers. We also use project´s website and our local and regional newspapers for public information. The results are also told in locally, regionally and nationally within Finnish counsellors-, Central Finland´s Counsellors- and Finnish Teachers (OAJ) -associations and also in a regional artteacher´s peer suport group VERME.
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